I believe that in current times our attention has been hijacked.
Look around you: addiction to our cellphones, social media, Netflix, emails, etc.
We always need a constant flow of this infinite entertainment matrix. But that isn’t new or the worst part of it.
The BIG problem is how all of these platforms have the power to manage and guide our attention and focus to whatever the algorithm wants.
It is powerful. Do you know why platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have so much power and influence compared to other types of content?
First of all, if you perform an MRI and see pictures of brain activity, it’s clear that over thousands of years of evolution, our brains are wired for real-life movement, not just for text or images.
So, it’s no wonder these platforms dominate the entire social media ecosystem over blogs, books, and text-based social media (Twitter), etc.
Then we come to the second and scariest part of the problem. As we delve deeper into this eternal doom scroll, which is literally a hijacking mechanism designed to make you an addict, we realize they are using one of your most powerful—
If not the MOST powerful—resources you have: Your attention.
Where energy flows, energy grows.
Master vs. Slave
Here, I want you to understand the difference between being the master and the slave of your attention.
Imagine you grab your phone looking for a video on how to cook pasta. But you get a cute puppy video. It’s 2 minutes long, no big deal. After that, you get a “Giant snake eats woman at the zoo” video, and oh wow, that sounds crazy! Before you realize it, you’ve been scrolling animal videos for 1 hour, and you still don’t know how to cook pasta. Sound familiar?
Vs
The master of attention grabs the phone, looks for the video, cooks the pasta, reads for 2 hours without distractions, purposely exercises (chest only for the purpose of the blog), and finishes the day by working on a business project.
Probably both examples don’t sound comparable, but they are. Why? Not just because the first one got “distracted,” but because that signals being a slave to attention rather than a master, and that makes all the difference.
ENERGY = MATTER-s
Now let’s get a little scientific-spiritual (I think they are deeply related, but that’s for another post).
It doesn’t matter if you believe that your thoughts and emotions (Energy) have a strong correlation with the material world (Matter) in a metaphysical/spiritual sense, or if you have a deeply scientific skeptical mind.
Both theories or lines of thought are converging on the same conclusion!
Heck, even Einstein’s theory of relativity says that under certain conditions, energy can be converted to matter and vice versa! E = mc^2.
So, if we can “wildly” assume that our thoughts radiating as “Energy” can have any impact over the material world “Matter” or even determine it, shouldn’t we be very careful about how we are using our attention?
Attention can be measured in multiple ways but correlate with “What you think, what you see, what you hear, how you spend your time,” etc.
But how is any of the media machines—throwing you whatever BS all the time—doing you any favors?
Distraction would be the lesser problem. Hijacking your attention towards negativity, self-defeating beliefs, low skill sets, and disturbing content being shown all the time should be the MASSIVE attack!
The worst of all of this is that I believe it’s like smoking in the 1970s. Read about social media smoking if you want more on that.
Basically, Big Tobacco is now Big Tech. Instead of monetizing with cigarettes, they monetize your attention. You are the product, my little rat.
The second part of why this is so pervasive but nothing is done is that, just like tobacco in the 1970s, social conditioning is showing us it’s okay. Why? Well, everyone does it, all the time, and nothing happens—no one is dying!
At different moments in history, there have been sets of problems or “controversial topics” that later end up being right!
Don’t you see the correlation, anon?
RISE UP, DON’T WAIT FOR SOCIAL PROOF, DON’T WAIT FOR EVIDENCE, IT WILL BE TOO LATE—
BE THE MASTER.